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Generic Update – aka, look, I’m not dead after all!

I haven’t posted anything here in entirely too long, so I thought I should post an update to confirm that I haven’t died. So, here I am. I haven’t died.

Actually, I’ve been neck deep in the formatting. I wasn’t happy with the first idea for the last chapbook, so I moved on to another idea, which I liked in digital, but when the print proof arrived, I hated the cover. It went from looking vaguely like waves hitting a beach to looking like garish splashes of primary colors, because all the subtle shifting of colors got lost in the printing process. It happens, but since I wasn’t happy with the print version, I had to redesign. When I found a cover design I was mostly satisfied with, it then clashed with the aesthetic inside, so I had to rework fonts and internal cover pages so it would feel more cohesive.

In between waiting for formatting changes to go through, I got started on the Ominbus edition, so there’s a very real possibility that the last chapbook and the Omnibus Edition may be released almost simultaneously. We’ll see how it goes.

The Omnibus turned out to be a formatting nightmare. As I tried to copy and paste text, it kept pasting formatting that was not the formatting of the original document. It constantly changed my margin settings. When I tried to adjust the margins on the entire document, it said it did, but it didn’t. It invented a bunch of new page styles from the conversion, that were all (in theory) identical but (in practice) pasted as being completely and wildly different from each other. I had to find and delete them all. I had to keep re-setting page sizes and margins, fix places where this crazy margin nightmare had caused lines to break in funny places, even though the formatting on the document I was pasting from and pasting to were, supposedly, identical.

I’ve never run into so many issues copying and pasting text between two identical documents before. It was hell.

And then, when I thought I finally had everything matching, I had to figure out how to skip a page number in the middle of a document, and that was a fresh level of hell. Tutorials were vague and convoluted. Video tutorials were just as bad when they weren’t even worse. I’d managed to deduce that I needed to use 2-3 different page styles in the document, and how to do that. But, every time I tried to start a new page style, it would change all the page styles I’d previously done and I had to start from scratch. Ultimately, I was forced to create two custom page styles specific to the document, avoid 100% of all default settings, and jump through a few circus hoops to make it all work, but I did it.

Yes, there was a late night victory dance when I finally got it to behave. Why do you ask?

So, at this stage, I’m waiting on my 2nd print proof of the last chapbook, and I’m working through the digital proof on the omnibus to find offensive line breaks and fix them. Both will probably be live in the next week or two as long as I don’t run into any other major issues, and then I can move on to my next project, whatever that may be. Maybe, with the poetry project done and over with, I’ll be able to dig deeper into my music studies again. Or maybe some totally unrelated project will strike me and I’ll find myself neck deep in something entirely new. Who knows? All I know for sure is that I drew well over 30 artsy borders for the last chapbook and ended up hating that idea once I actually saw it outside of my brain, so didn’t use any of them. Maybe I’ll come up with something to use them for in the next project. Only time will tell.